Instructors rushed to help UCLA stabbing victim

LOS ANGELES — Blood gushed from a student’s neck and formed a puddle on the floor of a UCLA lab as instructors struggled to stanch the wound.

The 20-year-old woman was taken across the hall after being slashed in the neck by a classmate, and two staff members quickly applied pressure and put gauze on the wound. Stunned students watched in horror.

“Her eyes rolled back in her head, I called out her name and told her to stay with me. She wasn’t really responding. I think she could hear me,” said chemistry lecturer Stacie Nakamoto, whose lab the victim was brought into.

The victim, who Nakamoto and police would not identify, went to the hospital in critical condition. On Friday, her family released a statement saying she was showing signs of improvement and was expected to recover.

Damon D. Thompson, 20, was arrested shortly after the attack and booked for investigation of attempted murder.

Immediately after the attack, he walked into the student information center three floors below.

“He was very calm and said he had stabbed someone,” said Carol Verduzco, an administrative assistant who works in the office.

She said she asked if he was joking and then she called the police. Thompson waited in a chair for the few minutes it took police to arrive.

“I was in shock,” Verduzco said, noting she saw no blood on Thompson.

Los Angeles police detectives were interviewing witnesses to try to establish a motive for the attack. Thompson and the victim were not romantically involved, Detective Mike Pelletier said.

A knife was recovered at the scene, a laboratory on the sixth floor of the Young Hall chemistry and biochemistry department in the heart of the university on the west side of Los Angeles.

Thompson remained in jail Friday on $1 million bail and was scheduled for arraignment Tuesday. Authorities did not know if he had obtained an attorney.

Thompson’s relatives said he is an only child who left his mother’s home in Belize two years ago to attend UCLA. His second cousin, 17-year-old Akilah Williams, said she was skeptical that Thompson was capable of the attack.

“He cares about what people think about him too much,” Williams told the Los Angeles Times. “He gets stressed out but that doesn’t mean he’d do something crazy.”

LAPD Detective Alan Behnke said Thompson did not have any previous criminal history and had cooperated with authorities.

Cyril Baida, a teaching assistant who was working in a lab across the hall, said he did not know the victim or the suspect but was told that they were lab partners or had worked together in a small group on projects in their lab section.

Microbiology major Sandeep Gill, 20, said the lab is the hardest part of the organic chemistry class.

“Every week you have to go to lab and finish it,” he said. “You’re always on a time constraint. You’re always on edge.”

The session was part of an organic chemistry class led by lecturer Alfred D. Bacher, who said Friday that the class can be demanding but doubted the stress was responsible for the attack.

“I’ve been teaching this class for eight years, and I’ve never had this type of problem before,” he said.

Witnesses said the attack left the blood-drenched woman dazed and near fainting.

UCLA spokesman Phil Hampton said he could not provide details of the attack, adding: “Everything is still under investigation.”

Lab classes were canceled Friday and counselors were available for students. Some said it seemed surreal that such violence could intrude on the normally subdued Bruin campus at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Olga Prikhodko, 20, said she had been in the lab but left about an hour before the stabbing.

“I don’t really know what to think. It’s weird it happened so close,” she said. “You’re sitting there working in a lab with these people, you think everything is fine.”

Jackie Avila, 20-year-old pre-dental student, added: “It did make me fearful. It could have been me in the chemistry lab.”

Chemistry and biochemistry chair Albert Courey said he’d never seen anything like this happen during his 19 years at the university.

“It was shocking,” he said. “Normally our students work really well together.”